James Riordon's "Crush"

James Riordon is a journalist who covers physics, math, astronomy, chemistry, and Earth science. His articles have appeared in Science News Magazine, Quanta Magazine, Scientific American, New Scientist, and the Washington Post, among other publications. Riordon is currently a senior science writer with NASA's Earth Science News team.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Crush: Close Encounters with Gravity, and reported the following:

What's on page 99:

Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz were the best of frenemies. As two of the greatest mathematicians in the last 500 years, they independently invented calculus, and feuded brutally over who deserved credit for the powerful new branch of math. All the while, Newton and Leibniz deeply admired each other’s genius.

Page 99 of Crush features my attempt at a bit of Newton/Leibniz fanfiction. I exploit Newton’s tortured relationship with Leibniz to show how he could have studied gravity by petulantly hurling things at a portrait of his rival hung on a dining room wall. With a little poetic license, including the gift to Newton of a laser pointer from a passing time traveler and his dining room being hoisted on a crane and then released to free-fall to Earth, I imagine how Newton could have compared his version of gravity with the one Einstein discovered centuries later.

Does the Page 99 Test work for Crush?

Page 99 isn’t a perfect reflection of Crush as a whole, but it’s pretty good. Throughout the book, I strived to explore gravity with examples, analogies, and stories that are different from the standard fare in the field. A few sections, including the portion on page 99, are fanciful. Most are based firmly on historical facts. In either case, I worked to accurately depict what we know about gravity, from the microscopic scale to its role in shaping the cosmos, and through time from the Big Bang to the ultimate fate of the universe eons from now.

One of the challenges of a book about gravity is ensuring that it’s compelling to a broad spectrum of readers, including curious nonscientists and experts in the field. The anatomy of snakes and elephants, the possibility of life inside black holes, and the challenges of living without gravity for extended trips in space are among the entry points to important subjects related to gravity that I believe would surprise readers of nearly any expertise level.

I could have stuck with the more straightforward and pedantic approach. But wouldn’t you rather know that Galileo pondered how many dogs and horses you could stack before their bones would break; why gravitational waves are crucial for the existence of life as we know it; or how you can explore the structures hidden inside black holes with simple experiments in your kitchen sink?

I’m guessing that most people prefer the fun and fanciful approach to pondering gravity. For those readers, I give you Crush.

Visit James Riordon's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marion Orr's "House of Diggs"

Marion Orr is the Frederick Lippitt Professor of Public Policy and professor of political science and urban studies at Brown University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America's Most Consequential Black Congressman, and shared the following:

The Page 99 Test fits with my new book, House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Consequential Black Congressman, Charles C. Diggs, Jr. The book shows that Diggs was a serious policy-oriented legislator who took Congress’s “oversight” authority seriously. On page 99 of House of Diggs, Diggs is in his element. Page 99 describes Diggs pressing the Kennedy administration to force the major commercial airlines to hire Black Americans for in-flight positions as pilots, engineers, and flight attendants. Discrimination was rampant in the airline industry. When Diggs entered Congress in 1955, there were nearly 5,919 stewards or stewardesses. None was Black.

Congressman Diggs was aware that it was a violation of executive orders issued by President John F. Kennedy for any corporation receiving federal government contracts to discriminate based on race. Page 99 covers Diggs discussing with Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who chaired Kennedy’s Committee on Government Contracts, a strategy designed to force the airlines to open in-flight employment opportunities to Black pilots, engineers and flight attendants. Diggs pushed Johnson to tell the airline executives that they will lose millions of dollars in federal contracts if they did not hire Black pilots, engineers, and flight attendants. By threatening to cancel existing federal contracts, Lyndon Johnson made hiring Black flight attendants a personal priority, a pace that accelerated after Johnson ascended to the presidency and signed the Civil Rights Act in 1965, outlawing racial discrimination.

I show in the remainder of House of Diggs that Charles Diggs’s approach to the issue of discrimination in the airline industry was emblematic of his approach during his time in Congress, dogged persistence combined with moral certainty.

House of Diggs also shows that Diggs’s contributions were international in scope. In 1959 he became the first Black member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. From this position, and later as chair of the Subcommittee on Africa, a position he assumed in 1969, Diggs ignited, virtually alone, what little congressional interest there was in Africa. Diggs used the Subcommittee on Africa to raise America’s awareness about apartheid, the political system in South Africa that prevented the country’s Black majority from having a public policy voice. House of Diggs describes how a lot of the early work in the American anti-apartheid movement began in Diggs’s congressional office. Diggs played a key role in the formation of TransAfrica, the powerful anti-apartheid organization. Randall Robinson, TransAfrica’s first executive director, worked as Diggs’s chief of staff, and learned a lot about Africa from Diggs.

House of Diggs details how Diggs cajoled and pushed U.S. agency heads, cabinet secretaries, and presidents when necessary to advance civil rights for Black Americans and to change U.S. African policy.

Learn more about House of Diggs at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Min Joo Lee's "Finding Mr. Perfect"

Min Joo Lee is an assistant professor in the Department of Asian Studies at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Finding Mr. Perfect: K-Drama, Pop Culture, Romance, and Race, with the following results:

Page 99 of Finding Mr. Perfect: K-Drama, Pop Culture, Romance, and Race examines online discourse among some Korean pop culture fans who expressed interest in forming intimate relations with Korean men. After analyzing some of the quotes from the online spaces, I make the following observation:

However, the comments risk perpetuating Western Orientalist stereotypes of Asian masculinity that effeminized them when such characteristics are deemed to be facts applicable to all Korean men rather than as one of many facets of Korean masculinity. After all, to say that “a Korean guy is a guy before he is Korean” implies that Korean men are somehow atypically masculine because of their Korean-ness and only conform to the conventional concept of a “guy” when he prioritizes that identity above his identity as a Korean, as if the two identity categories cannot coexist.

If the readers open my book to page 99, they would be able to deduce approximately half of the book’s main argument.

The book is largely divided into two parts. Chapter 3: Digitalized Intimacies of Hallyu (which page 99 is a part of) and Chapter 4: “Korean Men Are So Bad Because They Are Perfect”: Hallyu Tourists’ Experiences in Korea examine Hallyu tourism from the transnational fans’ perspectives. I argue that while the Korean pop culture fans’ racialized erotic desires for Korean masculinity are problematizing the overtly racist stereotypes of East Asian masculinity that proliferated in the West for a long time, such desires risk essentializing Korean masculinity in different ways if the fans are not careful with how they conceptualize their desires. Meanwhile, Chapter 1: Mouth Agape and Ecstatically Screaming: National Media and Industry Personnel’s Conception of Foreign Hallyu Fans and Chapter 5: “How Can We Compete with Men Like That?”: Korean Men’s Perception of Their Newfound Popularity examine the Korean government and some Korean men’s perspectives on Hallyu tourism. In these chapters, I argue that Korea operates through its own racialized erotic desires for foreign fans. The main message of the book is that Hallyu tourism is driven by the disparate racialized erotic desires of the Korean government, some Korean men, and a subset of Korean popular culture fans. If readers open the book to page 99, they can find the first part of my main argument.

Learn more about Finding Mr. Perfect at the Rutgers University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Raphael Magarik's "Fictions of God"

Raphael Magarik is assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Fictions of God: English Renaissance Literature and the Invention of the Biblical Narrator, and reported the following:

From page 99:

foregrounding alternatives, Cowley emphasizes the “conjectural,” artificial element of his narration.

As he foregrounds the arbitrary, possibly mistaken exegesis that undergirds his own narration, Cowley also lards the passage with evocations of music, such that his ekphrasis 0nally serves an oral, auditory art form associated more closely with narrative poetry. Where the Jewish sources on the New Year speak simply of sounding a horn, Cowley imagines an all-day music festival, with instrument played “From op’ening Morn till night shuts in the day” (II.228). Similarly, he writes that the Jews think that Abram, “whilst the Ram on Isaac’s fire did fry, / His Horn with joyful tunes stood sounding by” (II.238–39). Though the association between the ram’s horn, the binding of Isaac, and the New Year is indeed, as Cowley’s note says, “the common position of the Jews,” he adds the (comical) image of the relieved father instrumentally accompanying the barbecue. In the note, Cowley bristles at the Jews’ suggestion that consequently only “Rams Horns” may be played on the New Year; that would ruin the orchestral, entertaining performance he is imagining. This performance becomes the auditory motivation for the tapestry sequence, which concludes with the ram burning “while on his Horns the ransom’ed couple plaid, / And the glad Boy danc’d to the tunes he made” (II.328–29). The dancing boy evokes the dancing David, connecting this episode to the meta-poetic, musical performances that run throughout the Davideis. Cowley frames his ekphrasis by pointing up its fictional construction and amplifies a musical motif at the expense of the visual artistry.

The musical element is more salient because, besides naming their origins on a “Syrian loom” (a sly nod to his importation of a classical trope), Cowley does not describe the tapestries at all as visual art. They are instead excuses to tell biblical stories. Most strikingly, while the first nine images record speci0c moments, the tapestry depicting the binding of Abram is a visual impossibility: Can an image capture how, say, Isaac “sometimes walk’d before / And sometimes turn’d to talk” (II.30:–8), or Abram “mount[s] slowly,” then cries, lifts the knife, smiles as he hears the angel, and so on? Perhaps we are to imagine the tapestry as a graphic novel, but no effort is made to “story-board” the narrative into scenes. Rather, the ekphrasis functions as an impersonal device of narration, a repository not of images but of a told story. Comparing this scene to the Christiad’s ekphrastic scene discussed in my introduction, one notices how, unlike Vida (or, for that matter, Virgil), Cowley ignores the viewers, who are introduced and then disregarded. Because the physicality, visuality, and sense of scene disappear, the ekphrasis resembles one of Cowley’s other “digressions,” passages in which

Page 99 of my book, Fictions of God, comes from the chapter on the mid-seventeenth century English poet Abraham Cowley’s unfinished biblical epic, The Davideis; here, I am discussing Cowley’s descriptions of visual art and music within his own poem; through these descriptions, he meditates on his own fictive reimagining of scriptural material. Cowley is hyper- aware that as he reads through the dense thicket of critical debates in the commentaries on the biblical books of Samuel, he makes interpretive choices that reflect his own literary needs and interests; often, he invents his own, fictional material. By representing art-making in the Israelites’ world (tapestries depicting earlier scriptural events, music played at the New Year festival, and so on), he finds models for his own artistic practice.

Surprisingly, this page decently captures the book as a whole. Fictions of God is all about how early modern commentators and then imaginative writers saw in the Bible not an authoritative foundation of truth but a model for fictional invention. They came to understand scriptural stories as told by human, characterized narrators, each with a limited and specific perspective—and each of whom is thus potentially unreliable. Page 99 offers a tiny example of many of the book’s big arguments: that writers like Cowley encountered the Bible not as a singular, clear text but as densely mediated, externally through scholarly and theological commentaries, and then internally because they understood apparently third-person, impersonal narration to reflect specific human perspectives. My book thus offers a prehistory of an idea readers today mostly take for granted (the distinction between authors and narrators), which, I show, emerged during and through the turbulent, early modern process of secularization. (The piece of the book not represented on page 99 is this broader, social and political context: state formation, disciplining religion, suppressing enthusiastic popular movements inspired by claims to direct divine revelation, producing new confessions and churches, and so on.) A coincidence also helps this page do representative work: it contains a sharp contrast between Cowley’s poem and an earlier biblical epic I discuss in my introduction (Vida’s Christiad), which exemplifies my argument that the seventeenth century witnesses a massive increase in narratological sophistication in poetry written using biblical themes. I even considered putting the material on page 99 in my introduction for that reason, but ultimately decided it was too technical to belong there.

Learn more about Fictions of God at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Goodale's "Extracting the Future"

Mark Goodale is Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Lausanne and author of Reinventing Human Rights and A Revolution in Fragments, among other books.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Extracting the Future: Lithium in an Era of Energy Transition, and shared the following:

From page 99:

Minchin had been born on a country estate in County Tipperary, Ireland, before emigrating to New Zealand in 1852 with his family at the age of three. When he was sixteen, he was sent to London for his university studies. After completing a degree at King’s College, London, he worked as an engineering apprentice and was certified as a civil engineer in 1870. During his apprenticeship, he gained valuable experience working on the Tower Subway (a pedestrian passage under the Thames River that closed in 1898) and on different railway projects. In 1873, the young Irish engineer applied to work for the British government, which sent him to Bolivia to conduct engineering and survey work in collaboration with Bolivian colleagues.

Ballivián would go on to become one of the most influential Bolivian academics and scientific administrators of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Besides overseeing a number of historic national censuses and later serving as Bolivia’s agriculture minister, he coauthored (with Eduardo Idiáquez) the magisterial Diccionario Geográfico de la República de Bolivia (1890) and became the director of the Geographical Society of La Paz in 1897. During his long career, Ballivián participated in numerous regional and international scientific congresses and was perhaps the most cosmopolitan Bolivian scientist over these decades (he died in 1921).

Minchin’s future trajectory was also luminous in its own way. He did perform engineering work on behalf of various Bolivian agencies, including a study of potential railway networks that took him to the salar region. However, by 1880, he had left government work to focus his expertise on mining. By the 1890s, Minchin had become wealthy as the owner of mines in Oruro and Uncía (which is in the north of Potosí Department). After suffering a stroke, Minchin left Bolivia for good in 1911 and died in 1922 in London. Before leaving Bolivia, he sold all of his mining stakes for the enormous sum of £600,000 (about $75 million today).

On page 99 of Extracting the Future I’m recounting the histories of two geographers who played key roles in developing knowledge about the region of the Salar de Uyuni, the largest evaporated lake in the world. Flowing under the massive halite surface of this vast expanse of white is the elusive brine that contains the planet’s largest known reserves of lithium, one of the pillar minerals of the so-called green energy transition. The Page 99 Test works very well in this instance because one of the things I do in the book is to uncover the forgotten (or never known) geographical, social, and economic histories of lithium extraction. I do this biographically, as on page 99, but I also do this by tracing what I describe as “genealogies of extractivist entanglement,” the ways in which countries and regions of the world continue to find themselves enmeshed in global economic webs and the struggle for “critical” resources, even as the underlying resources themselves change over the decades and centuries. As I argue, in this sense, lithium is no different from a long line of other non-renewable resources in Bolivia that have been the object of intense geopolitical and economic desire by powerful empires, countries, and companies: silver, guano, rubber, tin, oil, and natural gas.

The discussion on page 99 illustrates something else: the way in which foreign scientists have long been sent to Bolivia as agents of economic and political power. The Irishman Minchin was contracted by the British government, which had developed deep ties to Bolivia’s mining sector in the nineteenth century, largely at the behest of private mining and railroad syndicates. At the same time, Minchin’s work in Bolivia was done in collaboration with Bolivian counterparts like Ballivián, who were eager to extend their professional networks. This tradition of opening the country to foreign researchers and companies is also something I analyze in detail in the book, a tradition that the now-former Movement to Socialism (MAS) government desperately wanted to overcome by bringing the lithium project under the control of the state. In the end, however, the Bolivian government was never able to escape the tentacles of extractivist entanglement; only the foreign interests changed.

Visit Mark Goodale's website.

The Page 99 Test: Surrendering to Utopia.

The Page 99 Test: Reinventing Human Rights.

--Marshal Zeringue

Iftekhar Iqbal's "The Range of the River"

Iftekhar Iqbal is Associate Professor of History at the Universiti Brunei Darussalam.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Range of the River: A Riverine History of Empire across China, India, and Southeast Asia, with the following results:

Page 99 of The Range of the River is set along the upper and middle Mekong. It follows the Akha community, whose “circulatory” pattern of movement was disrupted when French and Siamese border-making along the Mekong turned a fluid frontier into a taxed and policed line. The page then shifts to the Loutzu in Yunnan, whose “wild independence” rested on their ability to move cotton, salt, and other commodities along the river’s trading corridors, despite repeated attempts by Chinese officials to extract tribute. It closes in the lower Mekong, drawing on David Biggs’s history of hydraulic engineering and insurgency and Philip Taylor’s ethnography of Cham Muslims to show how ecological fluidity and access to fresh water shaped both resistance to state encroachment and Cham Muslim identities in the delta -- echoing Charles Wheeler’s ‘looking at the river, thinking of the sea’

Would a browser opening the book to page 99 get a fair sense of the whole? I think the Page 99 Test works reasonably well for The Range of the River. The page does not spell out the overarching argument, but it does place the reader in the midst of what the book is trying to do: track how imperial border-making, local mobility, and ecological infrastructures became tightly intertwined along Asia’s great river systems.

Throughout the book, “looking at the river, thinking of the sea” works as a prime protocol of reading and writing, and it captures one of the major spirits of the book. Scenes are anchored in specific river stretches, yet they are always oriented toward wider oceanic horizons, spanning both mountains and valleys. I move between the headwaters and deltas of rivers such as the Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, Mekong, Red and the Yangzi, tracing how upland communities, traders, boaters, and officials negotiated fluvial networks that linked China, India, and Southeast Asia. Page 99 is typical in the way it juxtaposes different reaches and ethnic groups while keeping the river itself as the connective tissue.

Learn more about The Range of the River at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jon Moen and Mary Tone Rodgers's "Before the Fed"

Jon Moen is a Professor of Economics at the University of Mississippi. He has published papers on US slavery, retirement, and bank panics during the National Banking Era. He is a member of the Economic History Association, the Economic History Society, and the Cliometrics Society. Mary Tone Rodgers is an Adjunct Instructor of Finance and Economics at the State University of New York. She enjoyed a 30-year career at Merrill Lynch before moving to academia where she received the 2022 Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Moen and Rodgers applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Before the Fed: J.P. Morgan, America's Lender of Last Resort, and reported the following:

On page 99 we find President Grover Cleveland stymied in two attempts to resolve a rapidly developing financial crisis in the winter of 1895: he must replenish the US gold reserve. The terms on which he can borrow money are too rigid to produce what he needs: a huge infusion of gold to support payments of US debts in gold. Without an immediate gold inflow, the US would resort to paying the interest on its debt in silver, anathema to essential European investors who were securely on the gold standard. Page 99 sets the stage for J. P. Morgan’s entrance to the drama. Up to this moment in the book, Morgan has already stepped in to stop bank runs, calm panicky markets, and supply emergency loans when others failed. But the stakes on page 99 are higher than anything he has ever confronted, putting him at the edge of the riskiest rescue operation of his career. What unfolds over the next twenty pages is not just the largest last-resort loan in American history up to that point, but a rescue that reshapes the financial role Morgan will play until the Federal Reserve forms to take on the job.

The Page 99 Test works because on that page we discuss a core theme of our book: the US had a paucity of official tools at its disposal to address financial crises and therefore relied on the voluntary actions of bankers like Morgan to create lifelines to preserve financial stability. To motivate other bankers to join him in collective action Morgan has to try to make last resort loans profitable to them. On page 99 we do what is distinctive among financial histories: we show how risk, return and prices of last resort loans were estimated by Morgan’s banking network.

However, page 99 does not touch on many of the other related themes we develop in the book. It does not touch on how he adapts his syndication device for arranging routine loans to the railroads to arranging loans to quell crises; how his approach evolves from saving his father’s firm, to saving customers, to eventually saving the US financial system; or how he incurs some massive losses on some last resort loans. And it doesn’t spell out the similarities between how Morgan crafted last resort loans and how the Federal Reserve does them today.

Learn more about Before the Fed at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joanna Dee Das's "Faith, Family, and Flag"

Joanna Dee Das is associate professor of performing arts at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of the award-winning book Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora.

Das applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Faith, Family, and Flag: Branson Entertainment and the Idea of America, and shared the following:

The first paragraph on page 99 makes an important point in my book: that live performances in the tourism mecca of Branson, Missouri in the 1960s-1980s gave country music the sense of authenticity needed to counterbalance the genre’s strong commercial roots. As I write, “While sitting at home listening to the Barn Dance Radio Hour or a [country music] LP, one could imagine the social world of rural Americana. By attending a Branson show, one could experience it.” The second paragraph gives an example of a quintessential Branson performer who moved to the town in the 1980s boom era: Boxcar Willie, who was an accomplished country music performer who hadn’t ever quite reached #1 hit status. He maintained success with a heavy touring schedule, but Branson gave him an opportunity to settle down. He became one of the city’s biggest cheerleaders. Page 99 quotes from him: “I don’t think there is a better part of the U.S. that a fellow can open a business or move to such as the Branson area.” He definitely supported the idea of Branson as ideal not only because of its spirit of free entrepreneurship, but also adherence to an ideal of rural America as real America. As I write on 99: “He famously turned down $20,000 a week on Broadway for Branson. He harbored a disdain for urban poverty, which he did not explicitly state in racial terms but was implied by echoing Reagan’s coded language about welfare queens.” Boxcar Willie championed hoboes (that was his persona), but disdained bums, even though one could argue that both terms are names for transient people without stable jobs or homes.

The Page 99 Test works for Faith, Family, and Flag: Branson Entertainment and the Idea of America because it reiterates one of my central claims that live performance in Branson, Missouri weaves together multiple strands of conservative ideology into a coherent whole. It demonstrates how Branson performers have championed the city as a model of both economic conservatism (the free market) and cultural conservatism, the latter which has sometimes dipped into racism (ie, Boxcar Willie’s implication that unemployed white men of the Great Depression, or hoboes, were valiant and moral despite their transience, whereas unemployed Black men on the street corners of New York were lazy.) Sometimes, capitalism and authenticity are in conflict with each other, which means that economic and cultural conservatism can be in tension. Live performers help ease tensions to create coherence. Yes, country music is fully invested in the capitalist marketplace, but through Branson performers like Boxcar Willie, who will chat with you before, during, and after the show, who will sign autographs and pose for pictures, who doesn’t seem too big for his britches despite his commercial success, makes audiences feel like the music is authentic, for lack of a better word. The Boxcar Willie example continues onto page 100, so you don’t quite fully get the whole picture just with page 99, but you get enough.

I think this Page 99 Test should work for any well-written nonfiction book. As a nonfiction author, you have to keep reiterating your main points and tie all specific examples back to those main points. Therefore any given page should be able to serve as a microcosm of the whole.

Visit Joanna Dee Das's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Mosseri's "Trust Fall"

Sarah Mosseri is a sociologist and writer whose insights are shaped by years spent working on both sides of the labor divide—from the service counter to the strategy room.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Trust Fall: How Workplace Relationships Fail Us, with the following results:

On page 99, I draw out one of the central insights from my ethnographic research into workplace relationships: some managers cultivate trust not through mastery or authority but through what I call “endearing incompetence.” The page focuses on Paul, a restaurant manager whose small mistakes and disheveled style actually worked in his favor. His errors weren’t liabilities; they humanized him. They signaled authenticity and a kind of self-effacing humility that softened the power gap between manager and worker. As I write, “Paul’s fumbling manner set him apart from the typical manager and helped lay the groundwork for personalized relationship building.” Later on the page, I contrast this with a more buttoned-up, by-the-book style of management, one that many workers experienced as rigid, distant, and harder to relate to. Where Paul’s endearing incompetence invited closeness, the more formal approach heightened social distance.

The Page 99 Test works fairly well for this book. It not only represents the narrative, data-grounded style of the book, but it also serves as a microcosm for several of the book’s arguments. The comparison between the two management approaches illustrates how styles of competence aren’t just technical; they are deeply social. Page 99 doesn’t yet dive into the darker side of this dynamic, but it hints at it through lines like, “[his imperfections opened] the door to a humanity bubble where intimate connections could thrive unimpeded by business operations.” That moment foreshadows the broader critique to come: how the very traits that make managers feel approachable and authentic can also be leveraged in ways that obscure power, blur boundaries, and deepen workers’ dependence.

The page also sets the stage to discuss the unequal terrain on which these dynamics unfold. Endearing incompetence is not equally available—or equally persuasive—to everyone. It is most effective for white men whose competence is assumed by default, making their mistakes appear charming rather than disqualifying. For white women and people of color, the same behaviors often fail to generate trust and may even be interpreted as evidence of inadequacy. In this sense, page 99 isn’t just a snapshot of relational style; it’s an early window into the book’s argument about how workplace intimacy and trust rest on, and reproduce, broader social inequities.

Visit Sarah Mosseri's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anthony Fletcher and Ruth Larsen's "Mistress"

Anthony Fletcher was formerly professor of history at the Universities of Sheffield, Durham, and Essex, and professor of English social history at the University of London. His works include Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500–1800 and Growing up in England. Ruth M. Larsen is a senior lecturer in history at the University of Derby. An expert on gender and the country house, she has contributed to several books on the subject.

Larsen applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Mistress: A History of Women and their Country Houses, and reported the following:

Page 99 of this book looks at three elite women and the extent to which they were able to access and manage family finances. It shows how Frances, ninth Viscountess Irwin of Temple Newsam, Leeds, inherited the house from her husband in 1774, and was able to reshape the property. This case is contrasted with the situation of Sarah Ponsonby and Lady Eleanor Butler, who are also known as the Ladies of Llangollen. As ‘women without men’ their income was insecure and they relied heavily on gifts in order to maintain their way of life.

This page would give the reader a very good indication of what the book is like more widely. The variety of female experiences in their ability to be the ‘mistress’ of the country house is the central tenant of the book, and the degree to which they had control over finances is, of course, really important to this. However, it was not the only way they could be mistresses, and in many ways these three women were outliers; most mistresses of the country house did not own the property themselves, but had to work alongside their husbands in fulfilling this role. Some did so as happy partners, while others had to manage this despite their husbands being absent, uninterested, and/or emotionally cruel. The rest of the book explores these wider experiences, looking at motherhood, the role of the mistress beyond the country house, and their influence in designing the buildings, amongst other things. Therefore, page 99 is more of an excellent ‘taste’ of the volume, but – as should be expected – not the whole picture.

Learn more about Mistress: A History of Women and their Country Houses at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue